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1.5.10-Kingedmundsroyalmurder
Brick!club chapter 10: in which nothing is okay So apparently this is the chapter where I finally just can’t anymore. I made it through the surprise and through the Lark and through the firing and mostly through the Valjean parts and apparently it’s here that I finally hit the wall and just can’t deal with this anymore. I don’t promise to be coherent at all for this chapter review, so bear with me. I think a lot of what’s getting to me so much about Fantine’s story is how muchit’s all being painted as inevitable. Like, we all know that maybe there are things she could have done, or that if only Valjean had known it would have been better, or that friendship is good and support networks make everything better (most of the time), but none of that is really acknowledged within the narrative. There’s that one mention of people telling her to go talk to the mayor, which she brushes off, and after that nothing. She learns to live in poverty, she sells everything she has and them some, and there is no way out. This is how her life is and that’s all there is too it. It’s just so very bleak, and apparently even I have limits on how much bleakness I can stomach. (This is also the point where I admit that one of my primary flaws as a writer is that the things I like to write and the things I like to read are, as a rule, vastly different.) But okay. Deep breaths Tam, let’s try to actually talk about this in some form of linear, understandable form. Let’s start with pretty language. Pretty language is safe, right? L’hiver, point de chaleur, point de lumière, point de midi, le soir touche au matin, brouillard, crépuscule, la fenêtre est grise, on n’y ''voit pas clair. Le ciel est un soupirail. Toute la journée est une cave. Le soleil a l’air d’un pauvre. L’affreuse saison! L’hiver change ''en pierre l’eau du ciel et le cœur de l’homme. ''Winter, no warmth, no light, no noon, the evening touches the morning, fog, dusk, the window is grey, one does not see clearly. The sky is ''a basement window. The entire day is a cellar. The sky has the look of poverty. Horrible season! Winter changes to stone the water from ''the sky and the heart of man. Winter is my favorite season, but this is a lovely description of winter in the city. It’s just that I happen to ''like grey skies and short days and snow. (Also that I am, you know, middle class and have heat and clothes and food and a job.) So anyway, she cuts her hair to buy Cosette a skirt. And she does it so casually. Or, more accurately, the narrative treats it so casually. Because that’s the other things about this chapter: it’s incredibly matter of fact. The sentences are relatively short, for Hugo, and often devoid of emotion (which is ironic, given that this chapter managed to produce intense emotions in me). Fantine just walks into the barber shop and says, “cut them” and that’s that. It’s like the narrative style is mirroring her mental state and giving up when she has. And oh god, can we talk about this part? “Fantine pensa: «Mon enfant n’a plus froid. Je l’ai habillée de mes cheveux.» Elle mettait de petits bonnets ronds qui cachaient sa tête tondue et avec lesquels elle était encore jolie.” (Fantine thought: ‘my child is no longer cold. I have have dressed her with my hair.’ She wore little round caps that cut her shorn head and with them she was still pretty.) Two things: 1, she still believes (needs to believe?) that Cosette is happy and well cared for and that all her suffering means something. 2, she still has something to cling to here. She’s still pretty. It’s still okay. Fantine has been pretty her entire life. It’s pretty much always been one of her defining characteristics, both according to other people and according to the narrative. In her introduction we’re told that she’s pretty and that she’s virtuous. When she gets to M-sur-M she’s pretty and she loves her daughter. At this point her beauty is basically the only thing she has left, and even though her hair is cut she is still fundamentally herself. Her beauty is a metaphor for her sense of self. When she loses that she loses her everything. (And I can so, so empathize with losing the one thing you’ve used to define yourself for so long and how soul-searingly horrifying that is. I was lucky enough to get it back, but it’s still awful.) But even though she still looks pretty with hats on, she’s lost her hair and with it she starts seriously losing her former self. She goes from determination to hatred. Others have pointed out how this mirrors Valjean in Toulon, and I’ll just point out that I actually believe that Fantine hates everything in a way I never did with Valjean. Maybe it’s because I knew more about her pre-poverty, or maybe it’s better portrayed, but this hatred I buy. So she laughs and sings as she passes the factory. We’ll see her do this again when she gets the letter asking for 40 francs. I assume it’s her way of going, “fuck you I didn’t like you anyway” to the people she blames for making her life hell. This seems like a realistic reaction to me, albeit not necessarily a typical one. She’s still got a tiny scrap of dignity left at this point, and she’s using her hatred as armor. "Elle prit un amant, le premier venu, un homme qu’elle n’aimait pas, par bravade, avec la rage dans le cœur. C’était un misérable, une espèce de musicien mendiant, un oisif gueux, qui la battait, et qui la quitta comme elle l’avait pris, avec dégoût. Elle adorait son enfant." (She took a lover, the first who came, a man she did not love, act of bravado, with rage in her heart. He was miserable, a kind of traveling musician, idle rogue, who beat her and who left her as she had taken him, with disgust. She adored her child.) So this paragraph somewhat mirrors the hair one in structure, particularly the very short almost off topic sentence at the end. I assume she takes this lover as a further fuck you to everything, since he certainly doesn’t seem likely to pay her bills. I’m wondering why she doesn’t go that route. She certainly knows that it’s possible, what with the girls in Paris and her own experiences. Will no one take her, or is she still bitter about Paris and refuses to do that again? Is she sleeping with the guy because, well, everyone says she’s a slut so she may as well be one? Did she at least get money from the guy? And then the mention of Cosette, there at the end without any transition or connection. I feel like this might be mirroring Fantine’s own thought process, where everything comes back to Cosette. Kind of like Westley’s letters to Buttercup: "My cold is better and I love you. I have found work and I love you." "Quand je serai riche, j’aurai ma Cosette avec moi; et elle riait." (When I am rich I will have Cosette with me; and she laughed.) Oh, Fantine, honey. I don’t think even she believes that. She just can’t afford to think otherwise, can’t allow herself to imagine that things will be like this forever because if she does she’ll break and she can’t afford to do that. So Thenardier demands 40 francs and again she responds by laughing. I see this as a kind of ‘Sirius laughs as Peter kills 13 people and he knows he’s fucked’ kind of laugh. You laugh because otherwise you’ll cry and because everything is so completely absurd it is almost funny. There’s no way in hell Fantine can pay that, and she knows it and so do they, and the entire situation is ludicrous except that it’s real and there’s nothing to do but laugh or break. Though apparently she can read even though she can’t write. Did she learn? And then we go straight into grizzly horror with the teeth scene. Marguerite’s fatalism here is so hard. It’s the equivalent of, ‘what can I do, it pays a debt?’ but coming from someone else. And so Fantine goes to sell her teeth and we are treated to a genuinely horrifying image of her bloody smile, and I bow down before Hugo’s ability to disturb me to the core in a single paragraph. So Fantine throws out her mirror, having aged 10 years in one night, and with it her last ties to who she used to be. “Le pauvre ne peut aller au fond de sa chambre comme au fond de sa destinée qu’en se courbant de plus en plus.” (The poor woman could go to the back of her room like to the back of her destiny only by bending over further and further.) And in one sentence Hugo finishes the job of ripping out my heart and stomping on it. Because, again, this is just taken as obvious. This is her path, there’s no turning back, all thoughts of riches or daughters or new clothes are just fever dreams, never to be. And that’s not Fantine saying it, it’s Hugo. The narrative is painting her doom and it’s doing it so starkly. I hate this chapter. And her little rosebush is dead and I don’t know why this bothers me so much but it does. "Elle avait perdu la honte, elle perdit la coquetterie. Dernier signe." (She had lost her shame, she now lost her vanity. Last sign.) I am not just making up the beauty-as-a-symbol-for-her-sense-of-self thing apparently. I am not that happy to be right. "Elle passait des nuits à pleurer et à songer." (She spent her nights crying and dreaming.) I lied. This chapter can hurt me more. (Also, sidenote, I assume the pain in the shoulder comes from sewing 17 hours a day rather than her sickness.) So she, like Valjean, has a beast inside of her though, unlike Javert, we do not get to find out what kind. And she doesn’t even care when she has to turn prostitute. She’s been crushed to the point of not caring about anything. Which, when you consider how full of life and love she used to be, is the biggest tragedy of all.